If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
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Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#2Kottke's one of the very few blogs I've been reading for what seems like forever. He's still doing good work. Recently he's been trying membership, which I've not seen on a site like his anywhere else.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#3[deleted]
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#4If you can't wake up in the morning, you probably won't accomplish much.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#5No. The teaching ability is a completely different dimension, orthogonal to other skills/knowledge you have.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#6In job interviews I always zone in on the most complicated thing someone has worked on and then ask them to explain it to me. Often a thesis or a project or a large system or something low level to do with OS features etc...
It is amazing how rarely people can get it across to me in basic terms. In fact even the idea of breaking it down into non technical concepts seems to be surprising and alien to many people.
I really admire those who can.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#7The problem I find with this outlook is that it takes technical terms being jargon at face value. If you can't fall back on progress in language which allows you to express more complex ideas, you're not going to reach the same depth of understanding in simpler words without it taking a lot longer anyways - with most of your time spent reestablishing what you just threw out the window.
If you rehash it in smaller words, just by information density alone, aren't you guaranteed to be losing some detail?
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#8This is generally true but I will add one wrinkle.
And there are three kinds of explanation:
1. visual
2. mathematical
3. linguistic
So sometimes, you understand something visually, or mathematically, but you are forced to put it into verbal terms (say, over a text only channel, or voice), and then you may seem not to be able to explain it even though you understand it.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#9The problem I find with this outlook is that it takes technical terms being jargon at face value. If you can't fall back on progress in language which allows you to express more complex ideas, you're not going to reach the same depth of understanding in simpler words without it taking a lot longer anyways - with most of your time spent reestablishing what you just threw out the window. If you rehash it in smaller wor…
Explaining a concept doesn't need to be done with complex technical terms. Analogies are sufficient.
Executing on a concept using complex technology requires complex technical terms.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#10Or to quote PG's Write Like You Talk[0]:
And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way.
Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.